As a company proprietor for over a years, I depend on software and automation to simplify operations and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my attention How To Use GoHighLevel.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly aiming to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a desire come true theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and falling short) to switch to this preferred new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, hopefully you can pick up from my uncomfortable mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to use and it took care of every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist local business maintain their customers while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the best messages at the correct time. Use web site and social networks forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with very easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and repayment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours per week and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses an extensive customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small companies and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on streamlining sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it specifically eye-catching for businesses aiming to settle their technology stack.
Essentially, it simply functioned accurately with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got seduced by the alarm call of “shiny things disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly change your business … The grass typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower friction factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew changing systems was mosting likely to require moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s a summary of just several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning every little thing over– as well as taking care of shed performance throughout the switch.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would repay with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-term solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge mistake. The problems began piling up quickly, up until it got to a point I had to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I experienced.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion suggestions, managing subscription expiries and far more.
Everything seemed to be working penalty … till instantly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to customers that need to NOT have gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they slightly declared “web server concerns” were to blame. But this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, given that the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failing was completely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my company. I have thousands of calls depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Simple tasks like modifying workflows entailed excavating via food selection systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in completely different areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage total, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the small cost tag included pricey concessions …
Deceptive Pricing How To Use GoHighLevel
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the affordable price for access to many features. But I promptly learned this cheap base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core capability. Unexpectedly my credit card declarations had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed whenever you send out an email with their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, yet simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open rates drop practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out methods or attempted every troubleshooting trick, I might barely push open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards How To Use GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I might believe that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden fees, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a substantial mistake. The cons considerably surpassed any type of advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the sheer volume of issues was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of vital features properly or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– also after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough call to turn around program and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this fiasco.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey ill fortune. However in hindsight, it taught me a few essential lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing buzz around brand-new software typically obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simpleness over features. Properly designed devices ought to make your job life much easier, not extra complex and untidy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages depend on.
- Seek objective evaluations. Pleased assistance assesses suggest less if excessive concerns imply inadequate general use.
- Excellence is difficult. No solitary option can completely meet every unique service requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Step-by-step renovations normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be much more cynical of “as well good to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny new items. The tools you utilize daily must earn count on through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.